Spooks

Spooks has been waiting to be made ever since Fleming's Bond started the wild-fantasy spy genre. This is an attempt at a realistic depiction of the activities and lives of MI5 agents, in the way that The Bill or Casualty depict those professions. Sometimes this gives an eerie feeling of the series having been commissioned by MI5 in order to get an influx of new, preferably ethnic-minority, recruits.. but the plots are always riveting, dangerous and violent so it makes for great TV.

Most of the main characters from the first series have now left in various ways... except the boss and of course Colin.. who has to be my favourite character who no-one ever mentions. He's the most realistic spook to me.

I absolutely LOVE this series. I got hooked with the episode involving the deep fryer and I've been hopelessly addicted ever since. This series is incredibly suspenseful and involving and I cannot wait to see what they come up with every week. The acting and writing is superb. I love this genre and I'm glad to see someone is doing something worthwhile with it. Highly recommended!!

This show (titled MI-5) just landed on Tuesday nights at 10 pm, with many encores throughout the week on the A&E channel. For those of you who are not familiar with the american channels, A&E runs various biography shows, a few other british shows, among others. To put it another way, when I watched it, there were no commercials for beer or fast food. It is a smart interesting show without all the flash of "24" or "alias", which are among my favorite shows. In the first episode there was little background on the characters, which is very different for american television audiences. I felt like I had missed a few episodes. The show did not spend as much time on the tech stuff either, but somehow that didn't seem so important as a great story unfolded during the hour. Very little publicity about this show has made it out there, and I only hope that enough people will stick it out and give the show enough of an audience to continue, lest we be stuck with only more of the summer dreck from the big networks.

I read all the hype in advance of this program being shown on ABC-TV in Australia, and thought: yeah, yeah, show me something different. Maybe it's not too different, but it does deliver. I was a bit bored inititally by the straight delivery of MI-5 characters, and how terribly seriously they take their jobs. Matthew MacFadyen is a fine choice for Tom Quinn - he's big and tall, straight-faced, and very, very serious. Keeley Hawes is also very well cast, and eminently believable.

However the last two episodes shown here - the one about the mock terrorist attack, and last night's episode about the visit of the American presidential `circus' were rivetting stuff. I found myself holding my breath for a lot longer than was healthy for me! I was fascinated by how the US presidential entourage insisted they take over MI-5 files for `security purposes'. A metaphor for the world at the moment?? The suspicion that George Bush Jnr was visiting London specifically for a secret meeting with Colonel Gadaffi to negotiate compensation for Locharbie losses was very pertinent, given that Libya came forth with compensation - in the `real' world - just this week.

I look forward to more episodes of this straighter-than-straight, larger-than-life, but very entertaining series. I don't think it's very realistic, but then, who watches TV to indulge in more reality?

I came to this series in 2021 via Britbox, and I loved it from start to finish. American television could learn a thing or two from the British about storytelling.